Thoughts on My Mother and I As the post in the title link above indicates, my mother died on December 23, 2007, age 77, from a rapidly moving cancer she knew about for only three weeks. →[More:]

Things I didn't mention about my mother in the linked eulogy:

My mother came from a bleak Depression-era background, a family where joy seemed always to be quashed. The nuns in her Catholic upbringing seemed always to be on their guard against any glimmer of brightness shown by their female charges -- and Mom, a budding artist and articulate extrovert, caught the brunt of their punishment. Complimenting a young child was thought to give them "airs", and so only criticism was dispensed to children.
At age 11, Mom's father died, and she was told by her grandmother that it was her responsibility to take care of her mother, even though Mom was 11 and her mother was an adult. At age 15, she had to bail her stepfather out of jail, promising the lawyer he would seek treatment for his pedophilia. He, of course, didn't.
I think these moments broke my mother's spirit to an extent -- she struggled with a lifetime of what was likely Borderline Personality Disorder, characterized as extremely and uncontrollable labile moods and fragile self-esteem. She was never diagnosed formally, which I am grateful for, because even psychologists tend to stigmatize BPD patients and often refuse to work with them.
It was hard to live with my mother growing up, because she could not protect me from harm (in my case, emotional and sexual abuse in my community). She could be a scintillating conversationalist one minute and raging or morbidly depressed the next. She sometimes interpreted the ordinary foibles of her children as proof they didn't love her, and she felt so overwhelmed by her daily life that sometimes her form of discipline was threatening to kill herself or divorce my father.
It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to realize that I wasn't evil. It took even more time to realize my mother wasn't evil, just flawed. I developed empathy and even sympathy for my mother and forgave her years ago. But first, I had to allow myself to be angry at her, angry at the emotional roller-coaster of my childhood.
In her later years, surprisingly, my mother found some modicum of mental health. Rages and depressions became milder and fewer. I actually got to know the witty conversationalist and recognized parts of her in myself.
Perhaps my mother's dying brought out the best in her. She experienced serene moments in the last few weeks of her life, expressing gratitude for get-well cards. She sought out a priest and told him of her repressive Catholic childhood, and the priest apologized for the sins of the Church committed against her. She could then release a lot of her anger and find more peace.
My mother seemed to believe she could fight her cancer, even though it had already spread from lung to brain and bones at the time of her diagnosis. It's possible, however, that she was trying to keep the rest of us from suffering, as she often did (which, ironically, might have caused the cycle of depression and rage of earlier days). She thought she would make it to Christmas, at least -- her favorite holiday. She could no longer walk, and she was frail from weight loss, but she picked out a bathrobe and a festive rhinestone pin so she could oversee Christmas festivities from her rented hospital bed at home.
She didn't make it to Christmas. As my husband and I drove toward my parents' house on the first day of our visit, we received a phone call from my sister. "Mom's back in the hospital," she said.
We drove to the hospital instead. I hadn't seen my mother since my wedding in March because I live seven hours away. She had grown extremely frail, and she was barely cognizant. She fussed about nonexistent bloodstains on her wrist, and her speech was severely slurred. She had trouble breathing, and it was obvious to me that she would have, at most, a day or two. Nobody had spoken about a prognosis before that point.
However, Mom still had a message to send me. When my husband left the hospital room to get a drink of water, Mom glanced toward him, then toward me, and gave me two thumbs up. When he returned, Mom said, almost more clearly than she had said anything that day, "You two must be bored. Go out and enjoy yourselves."
That was the last my mother spoke to me, as she soon lapsed into a fitful semi-consciousness and died the next day. But that was her legacy -- the woman who had been denied joy in her childhood had given me permission to keep it -- even after her death.